Scott Nicholson - The Manor

"Ephram Korban would have despised such depraved moral weakness," Spence said.

"You talk as if you knew him."

"No, but I understand him. I can feel him. This house was his in more than mere ownership."

"Ah, you believe that ghost tripe?"

"I've felt the spirit move me."

Roth wondered how many drinks the man had downed with breakfast. "Then why not a book? We can do it as a tribute if you'd rather."

Spence lifted himself with effort. "I'd sooner write a trashy thriller, something with vampires and a Martian Pope and a government conspiracy. And an unlikely love interest. One must have a love interest to make the pot boil."

"Think about it."

"Excuse me, I have work to do. Real work." Spence carried his empty glass toward the study, no doubt for a refill.

Roth sat in the shade of the porch. Spence, dead in the bathtub, his fat, white gut displayed in a two-page tabloid spread. Moby dicked. That would be a picture worth a thousand words. And multiple thousands of dollars.

How to make that overtaxed heart explode? A menage a trois with Bridget and Lilith? Or put Paul and Adam on him. With his homophobia, Spence likely had some serious bones in the closet.

Roth smiled. There was an easier way, one that wouldn't involve the complicity of outsiders.

If Spence were so bloody in love with his work, what would happen if the work went into the fireplace? Best of all, he could blame it all on a ghost. Who could ever prove otherwise?

The wind played through the trees that surrounded the graveyard, a lonely music for a dead resting place high on the edge of the world. Sylva leaned on her walking stick, watching from the fence, too brittle to risk climbing over. The old woman had knelt in the grass, searched the ground for a minute, then picked something and passed it through the fence to Anna. It was a four-leaf clover.

"Lucky charm?" Anna asked.

"Better than luck. Lets you see the dead." — "I already do."

"Only when they want. This here gives you the power over them." Sylva nodded toward the grave of Rachel Faye Hartley. "That's the one you'll be wanting to summon."

"Summon?"

"Come in fire, dead come back. Say it. Third time's a charm."

"I can't do that."

"It's in your blood. You just got to believe."

Anna stared at the cold stone, the flowers chiseled by some delicate hand, a bouquet that never wilted. She believed in ghosts, and so she saw them. And since she'd arrived at Korban Manor, she'd see them more clearly than ever before. Maybe it was always a question of faith. Part of the belief might originate from the dead spirit, and a ghost had to dream itself back toward the living world.

Perhaps Anna and the ghost had to meet halfway in a union of sad and enslaved souls, and if she only had to recite an old mountain folk spell, that wasn't so much to ask. The ghost, in this case the person who had lived by the name of Rachel Faye Hartley, had to put forth the real effort. After all, it would be Rachel who wrenched herself from the dark peace of eternal slumber to rise and return to a world perhaps best forgotten. A world that held only the promise of pain and loneliness.

Anna looked down at the clover. Could she believe in magic? With cancer eating her flesh, she had to put all her faith in the permanent existence of the soul, or else she might as well leap from the top of Korban Manor herself. Without faith, what was the point?

She closed her eyes and said the words: "Come in fire, come in fire, come in fire."

A chill caressed her, a soft immortal coldness. When she opened her eyes, the woman in white stood before her, the bouquet in her diaphanous hands. It was as if Anna were looking into a trick mirror, because she recognized herself in that pale and transparent face.

"Anna," the woman said, in that same whispered tone that had haunted Anna's dreams, had called to her from the trail, had led her into the woods where George Law-son's spirit seized her in its severed hand.

"You," Anna said. "You're the one who summoned me here. It's wasn't Ephram Korban at all."

"You grew up beautiful, just like I always figured." The words were like splashes of ice water.

"What are you talking about?"

"I hated to send you away. I thought it was the only way to save you from him. But I didn't know."

"Send me away?" Anna looked at Sylva, who pulled her shawl more tightly about her bony shoulders. Sylva nodded her knot of skull bone, her face tired, wrinkles deepening, as if she'd aged fifty years since arriving at the graveyard. Anna looked at the ghost of Rachel, back to Sylva, and again at the ghost. Their eyes had that same shape, the dark arch of brow, the same hint of mystery. Just like Anna's.

Just like Anna's.

"You're her." The realization sliced through Anna with the slow sureness of a glacier, more implacable than cancer, an impossible truth that was all the more horrible because the impossible had become ordinary.

Anna's blood froze in her veins, as hard as the frost that still sparkled beneath the patches of tombstone shadows.

"It's all my fault," Rachel said. "That's my sorrow, that's what haunts me in my tunnel of the soul. The fear that Ephram uses to control me."

"Ephram Korban. What do I care about him?" Anna's tears ran down her cheeks like the tracing of lifeless fingers.

The ghostly lips parted, Rachel's form glimmered under the sunrise. "It was hard on me to lose you, harder even than dying. Harder even than being dead. Because being dead is just like being alive, only worse."

"Hard on you," Anna said. "Every night, in every new foster home, every time some stranger tucked me in, I prayed to God that you'd have to suffer. Even though I never knew you, I hated you. Because I never got to belong."

"I suffered, too."

"I hated you for not being there, for never existing. And now I find you, and you still don't exist."

"You don't understand, Anna. We need you."

"Need, need, need. What about me? I had needs, too." Anna flung the clover to the grave grass, the sobs shaking her. "Go away. I don't believe in you."

"Anna," Sylva said. "She may be dead, but she's blood."

"You can keep your blood. I'm done with it all." Anna moved between the stones, vision blurred by tears, scarcely aware of her feet, wanting only to be away, back in the world of ordinary pain, ordinary loneliness.

Rachel's voice reached across the grass, weaker, as if leaking from inside the mouth of an endless tunnel. "He haunts us, Anna. We're dead and he still haunts us."

Anna didn't even slow down. She had come here to find her own ghost. Now she had, and it was worse than she ever could have imagined. Her ghost didn't provide solace and the comfort of life beyond life. Her ghost brought the promise of eternal loneliness, proof that she would never belong, no matter which side of the grave claimed her.

"You don't know what it's like," Sylva shouted after her, the words swept by the October wind. "It's way worse to lose a daughter. I ought to know. 'Cause I lost Rachel."

Anna stopped near the shadow of Ephram Korban's monument. She turned, and her turning seemed as slow as the spinning of the earth, trickles of angry sorrow cold on her cheeks, flesh already numb to this new impossible truth.

Ephram Korban and Sylva.

Then Rachel.

And Anna.

Korban's name hovered before her in a watery haze, as if the chiseled letters on the monument gave weight to Sylva's words. Blood. Ephram Korban's blood ran through her, as tainted as that ancestral side which cursed her with the Sight, all bound up in this ridge of ancient Appalachian soil, a sorry dirt that couldn't even hold down its corpses.

Sylva called once more, but Anna wasn't listening. She climbed over the fence, her heart on fire with a single wish.